Harold Shea

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Actually, that's probably Astolph...

Harold Shea is the main character from a series of fantasy short stories and novellas. (The series is sometimes referred to as Enchanter or Incomplete Enchanter, from the names of the collected volumes.) The first three stories were written in 1940-1941, and the subsequent two in 1953-1954, all of which were co-authored by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt. A further nine stories were written from 1990-1995, two of which were written by L. Sprague de Camp and the rest by other authors. One more story (by Lawrence Watt-Evans) was published in 2005 in a tribute anthology dedicated to L. Sprague de Camp after his death.

In the stories, Harold Shea and other characters visit various settings from mythology and fiction. Each story has one primary setting that is visited, although some visit other settings briefly. The primary setting for each story is: Norse Mythology, The Faerie Queene, Ludovico Ariosto's epic poem Orlando Furioso, The Kalevala, Irish mythology, Orlando Furioso (again), Oz, Journey to the West, Don Quixote, The Aeneid, The Tale of Igor's Campaign, Baital Pachisi, John Carter of Mars, The Tempest, and finally Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem Kubla Khan.

Works in the Harold Shea series:

The original versions of the first three stories published in Unknown Magazine in 1940 and 1941 have fallen into the public domain and are available via the Internet Archive. The newer stories are still under copyright. Note that the stories were revised when they were collected for publication as novels, so some characters and events in the public domain versions of the stories are slightly different from how they are described here.

In reading order:

• "The Roaring Trumpet" (1940, Pratt and de Camp)
• "The Mathematics of Magic" (1940, Pratt and de Camp)
• "The Castle of Iron" (1941, Pratt and de Camp)
• "The Wall of Serpents" (1953, Pratt and de Camp)
• "The Green Magician" (1954, Pratt and de Camp)
• "Professor Harold and the Trustees" (1992, Christopher Stasheff)
• "The Case of the Friendly Corpse" (1941, L. Ron Hubbard, unauthorized, Harold Shea was not the main character)
• "Sir Harold and the Gnome King" (1990, de Camp)
• "Sir Harold and the Monkey King" (1992, Stasheff)
• "Knight and the Enemy" (1992, Holly Lisle, from an outline by de Camp and Stasheff)
• "Arms and the Enchanter" (1992, John Maddox Roberts, from an outline by de Camp and Stasheff)
• "Enchanter Kiev" (1995, Roland J. Green and Frieda A. Murray)
• "Sir Harold and the Hindu King" (1995, Stasheff)
• "Sir Harold of Zodanga" (1995, de Camp)
• "Harold Sheakespeare" (1995, Tom Wham)
• "Return to Xanadu" (2005, Lawrence Watt-Evans)

Tropes used in Harold Shea include:

• Action Girl: Belphebe/Belphegor, Britomart/Bradamant
• All Myths Are True: But not all at once.
• The Archer: Belphebe.
• Bawdy Song: Shea and Chalmers are forced to recite an epic poem or else be killed, but the closest thing that either one of them has memorized is The Ballad of Eskimo Nell.
  • This becomes doubly funny when one learns that in Spenser's political allegory, the Blatant Beast represents the Puritans.
• Black Magician Girl: Duessa, in "The Mathematics of Magic."
• Boisterous Bruiser: Many heroes and warriors met by Shea, including Thor in his very first voyage.
• Clingy Jealous Girl: Gertrude Mugler.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: between the characters from the modern world and the inhabitants of the alternate universes they visit.
• Damsel in Distress: Subverted in the third story, when Harold breaks into the tent of Belphebe's captor to rescue Belphebe, finds a Bound and Gagged person there... who is Belphebe's would-be captor, who had been tied up by her.
• Expy: In-story example: The Faerie Queene has expies of characters from Orlando Furioso.
  • However, is there really any such character as "Belphegor" in Orlando Furioso that is an expy of Belphoebe? I looked and didn't find any character name resembling that. And the names don't seem to be related, either; "Belphoebe" is from the the name of a Titan from Greek mythology plus a prefix meaning "beautiful", whereas "Belphegor" is from the name of a Moabitish deity "Ba'al Pe'or" mentioned in the Torah (or so says That Other Wiki).
    • In this case the "Phoebe" in "Belphoebe" is probably not the Titaness, but another name for the Moon-Goddess Artemis, who, as a virgin goddess, represents for Spenser the chastity of "The Virgin Queen" (as Gloriana represents her "glory" and Mercilla her "mercy").
• Genre Savvy: Arguably the whole point of the series. When Harold visits a world that inspired our work of fiction -- oddly enough, he manages to do quite well by running with the tropes that he (or the people he's with) remembers. At times, this has even been used for prophecy -- he remembers how the story came out.
• Heroes Want Redheads: Harold and Belphebe, respectively.
• Insufferable Genius: Ras Thavas from the John Carter of Mars setting
• Literal Genie: Magical spells sometimes give results different than what Shea or Chalmers intended, but which fit the literal meaning of the words they used.
• Magic A Is Magic A: Magic is stated to act this way, although how consistently the rules are applied may be debatable.
• Married Mai Waifu For Real: Harold Shea, from what little description we have of him, looks like his writer L. Sprague de Camp, married Belphebe from The Faerie Queene in "The Mathematics of Magic". They went on to have adventures together in the subsequent novels of the series.
• Massive Multiplayer Crossover
• Memetic Mutation: "Yngvi is a louse!" became a meme among science fiction fandom long before the Internet.
• Our Dragons Are Different: The wivern that Busyrane rides in The Mathematics of Magic, described by Harold as "some kind of a long-tailed pterodactyl."
• Public Domain Character: ...and public domain settings, too.
• Samus Is a Girl: Britomart (as in The Faerie Queene)
• Shared Universe: Orginally the character belonged only to Pratt and de Camp (with one unauthorized use (See Take That, below)); many years later, de Camp, the surviving partner, allowed other authors (so far, Roland J. Green, Holly Lisle, Frieda A. Murray, John Maddox Roberts, Lawrence Watt-Evans, Tom Wham, and particularly Christopher Stasheff) to play with the Enchanter universe.
• Take That: "Sir Harold and the Gnome King" has one directed at a certain other author who wrote Harold Shea into one of his stories without permission--and killed him off. (He got better.)
• Translator Microbes: Part of the method that Shea and company use to travel between worlds, as mentioned early on in "The Castle of Iron":

Polacek overheard. "But I enjoy thinking of it," he commented innocently. "Wonder how you say, 'Hi, toots!' to these babies. S'pose they speak English?" "You’re probably not speaking English yourself," replied Shea. "You only think you are. I found that out the first time I tried this symbolic-logic' stunt. Look."

• Trapped in Another World: The characters sometimes are prevented from returning to the "real" world until they've accomplished something.
• Warrior Poet: Lemminkainen from The Wall of Serpents.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: The story from 2005, "Return to Xanadu", is about what happened to a minor character from "The Wall of Serpents".
• You No Take Candle: The trolls in The Roaring Trumpet, Odoro the Imp in The Castle of Iron.